


Ash

by CommanderInChief



Category: Holby City
Genre: Angst, Character Death Time(TM), Gen, Lots and lots of fire, and fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-06 01:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12806334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CommanderInChief/pseuds/CommanderInChief
Summary: The sun rises on a very different Holby City.





	Ash

**Author's Note:**

> Basically my spin on the trailer for the December special. As per usual, my eternal thanks to theseventeenstairs/snapegirl for listening to my ramblings, fixing my terrible spelling and just generally being ace.

The hospital is on fire. 

 

Henrik Hanssen is trapped on the fifth floor. 

 

Not that they know it yet, of course. 

 

For now, the ignorance is a turquoise shade of calm. It rolls down the walls in moderate drips and, just for a moment, it stops, watches all these funny little people beneath. 

 

Jane from HR, her pink mouth open wide as she reaches out for a melting Malteser projected over the desk. Five minutes left on her break, then she’ll get back to work - her online dating profile open for quick peaks in the background. After all, what the hubby doesn’t know can’t hurt him. 

 

Alice, a secretary, with her mobile phone wedged between her shoulder and neck as she typed. The baby won’t stop crying and won’t stop crying and won’t stop crying and she thinks her wife might just be on the brink of going insane.  _ It’s Okay _ , her lips might form,  _ I’ll be home soon, I- _

 

Promise weigh heavy on Henrik Hanssen’s shoulders. He sits forward in an expensive leather chair, every muscle pulled forward, pulled  _ tight  _ by invisible puppeteer’s string. The hospital’s future flows from his pen in elegant black loops. Keep writing, keep writing because if he doesn’t, he’ll stop. He’ll think. Overthink. Today could not be counted by clock ticks or foot taps or the syllables of his own breathing. That’s how you make the thoughts overlap, coil around one another like dark brown snakes, tight and hissing and impossible to rip apart. 

 

A blot of ink leached into the paper, sprouting fingers that stretched greedily for his page. If he were to stay here forever, he wondered, how would it spread- crawling out of his nib to curl and grasp and claim- how long until the paper bleached black? How long until it began to sliver off the desk? 

 

An unlimited amount of ink, an unlimited amount of time. How long until they drowned? 

 

Funny, it was just as that question ended that he thought he might have had the first whiff of- 

 

Smoke is a vicious animal and funny isn’t funny at all when five floors down, an F1 stumbles back towards the wall. Anything away from the thick grey hand grasping and grabbing at their throat. Another step.  _ Break glass in case of emergency _ . He’s slamming the fire-bell with fingers that don’t work. Surgeon’s hands may not shake but he is not a surgeon ( _ will he ever be a surgeon, now? _ ) and his heart - Oh, that optimistic young heart - waits in anticipation. He hears-

 

Nothing happens when he coerces pen from paper, no fanfare, no applause.  _ Just make a start _ , Alice tells him, on the days when his eyes hang,  _ it’s easier after that _ . He remembered a time, when he was so much younger, before his body became filled with liquid lead, when she would have been right. 

 

Somewhere in his mind, that time is a small study, near the back of his father’s house. It was cold, dark, with the smell of winter earth and growing damp. It had belonged to his uncle - or his Grandfather, perhaps. As a boy, he had liked to imagine the former. They’d never met, of course, but he could never shake the image of this man, with a greying moustache and a kind smile, back when the tiles were white and the walls smelt of drying paint. 

 

It was always best in the evenings, when the sun would peek through the windows to colour the crumbling old furniture. By half seven, the whole room would shine like a polished green apple. Even his exercise books were made of gold. He had pressed his pencil down and the answers had come like- 

 

Silk sticks fast to Jac’s spine, her second skin, glued or burnt by sweat and heat. Coarse with adrenaline, there is no saying where her heart ends and her legs begin, only that she has to keep going.  _ One step in front of the other, Naylor, don’t think, just run _ . The electricity was going fast her chances of getting out of there without light were about the same as that of the people she’d had to leave behind. 

 

Lilian Cooper,  _ eighty three _ , aneurysm of the Coronary artery. 

 

Later, Jac would have time to hope that smoke had got to her first. 

 

But, now, she runs, runs like- 

 

“Hell,” Hanssen mutters, as the main light flickers out. There’s a book torch in his top desk draw and he fumbles for it. Typical that the bulbs never seem to fail during the- 

 

Daytime had died on AAU hours before. They work on phone batteries, torches, anything they can find. “Get the last of the patients out of here!” Orders Sacha, because  _ goddammit _ , someone needs to say something, “I’m going back up upstairs. There’s people still up there. With someone on the other side, we might have a shot at getting someone out.” 

 

Donna opens her mouth but Ric beats her to speaking, 

 

“I’ll come with you.” 

 

Both men nod, sparing a thought to God or something else. Together, they look to the corridor and run, run towards the- 

 

Yelling breaks out not two doors away. By torchlight, he watches as a new carpet of smog uncurls from slit gap in the door. 

 

Heat. Smoke. Yelling. Smog. 

 

His heart is ice. 

 

_ The hospital is on fire.  _

 

Henrik Hanssen is trapped on the fifth floor. 


End file.
